Leading Australiaâs key place to engaged with effective giving and the effective altruism community in Australia.
GraceAdamsđ¸
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The Data Is In: âEffecÂtiveâ PhilanÂthropy Has an EvÂiÂdence Issue
You shouldnât have had to go through any of this. I deeply value you sharing your experience and reflections, recognising the personal toll it can take, on a number of fronts.
I am angry at CEA, their response (and lack of) feels unbelievably bad.
As a woman who leads an EA organisation, I have a lot of thoughts and feelings that I cannot properly express at the moment.
You deserved better, women in this movement deserve better.
This is a great call out! It was featured in a longer report that we shared directly with other effective giving orgs, but wasnât called out explicitly as a single post.
Iâll share this again with the effective giving orgs :)
3 reÂcent posts from EffecÂtive AltruÂism AusÂtralia about our work and strategy
Thanks for writing this!
At EA Australia (Australiaâs effective giving fundraising and community building org), our recent impact evaluation found that in 2025 for every $1 spent on operations, we counterfactually moved $9 to effective charities ($5 was a conservative estimate).
You can read more about this in our blog post, which links the google sheet calculations and detailed reasoning for our model. Itâs been based on GWWCâs impact evaluation toolkit.
At the moment, my belief is that we are quite constrained by funding, and would be growing much faster with more resourcing over the next few years. Happy to talk with larger potential donors on this if anyone is interested and will be publishing a summary of our 2026 strategy on our website soon.
One of the reasons to have community members contribute to funding our operations, is the stability that having many smaller donors over few major funders. This makes us much less vulnerable to a major donor shifting direction in future.
We would love to be able to support more of our operations and growth from smaller donors and a variety of sources, and additional funding now would be spent on increasing our staff capacity (currently 4.5 FTE across effective giving and community building) to enable further growth!
In case Iâve convinced anyone, our donate form is here.
Rowan, this is enormously sweet! I just logged in to the EA Forum for the first time in ages and Iâm really honoured! Being public about my health has felt like a tough decision but knowing that itâs resonated with you and others makes it feel really worth it!
Iâm so thrilled that weâve achieved this milestone- and I canât wait to see what we can achieve in the future <3
Hi Habeeb,
I work at GWWC as the Head of Marketing :)
Thank you for your generosity and for sharing your perspective! We are actively interested in how we can help cultivate people giving effectively from all over the world, so this is really helpful feedback for us!
Iâve asked someone on the team who knows why we have the $5 minimum to follow up in the comments here, so stay tuned for their response. My guess is that with the processing fees associated, it might not make sense for us to support donations less than $5 - but this post will help us challenge those assumptions!
On why we donât have a bigger range of charities to donate to: We have a pretty strict process in terms of the charities we allow on our platform, which you can read more about in our inclusion criteria if youâre interested. Basically, we want to make sure that donors have options that are sufficiently high-impact, and that the charities get sufficient value from being on our platform.
Some suggestions on donating smaller amounts:
If there is a trusted person in the group, you could pool all your money together to be able to reach the threshold of $5, and maybe you could make a collaborative decision on where to donateâthis could even be a nice way to help talk about giving and your thought process with friends.
Wait until you are able to donate the minimum $5, and set aside this money in the meantime.
Against Malaria Foundation allows donations as low as $2 USD: https://ââwww.againstmalaria.com/ââDonation.aspx
I also liked the suggestions from others in the comments. I think thereâs lots of ways to donate and they donât all necessarily go through GWWC!
I appreciate your perspective on wanting to cultivate the habit of donating small amounts but also generally caution that especially for students, that youâre making sure you have enough for your own expenses and emergencies first. Making sure that the habit is sustainable is an important factor for long term giving!
Thanks again for sharing this, Habeeb and Iâll make sure someone else follows up about the $5 limit!
Hi satelliteprocess! Iâm Grace, the Head of Marketing at GWWC.
While you can take a pledge as a couple, and choose to give 10% of combined income, we have many people who are married or in long term relationships who have taken a 10% Pledge, and give 10% of their own income, and do not factor in their partnerâs income.
So two answer your two questions in short:
no, you donât need to both take the 10% Pledge or give 10% of combined income
yes, you can just pledge as an individual, and give 10% of your individual income
If you have any further questions, you can get in touch with us at community@givingwhatwecan.org
I do really think that donating thoughtfully in ways that mean that someone is statistically living because of the interventions youâve funded is just something to be really proud of.
I also wanted to say that I think itâs truly okay to also value making your own life more enjoyable, alongside improving the lives of others. I choose to donate at least 10% of my income, but I also spend money on many things I donât needâbut I value a rich life full of diverse experiences as well as helping others, and I donât feel bad about it! Iâm fulfilling my goal of being a net positive addition to the world, and enjoying my life :) I wanted to add this because I think people in the EA Community often hold themselves to extremely high moral standards!
One quick GWWC tooling note: If you take a Trial Pledge (starting a 1% of income for at least 6 months) or 10% Pledge, we have really nice dashboards and graphs that help track your donations over time!
Hi satelliteprocess!
Iâm Grace, the Head of Marketing at GWWC.
Giving What We Can offers a number of giving pledges, the most popular being the âTrial Pledgeâ and the â10% Pledgeâ
A Trial Pledge allows you to pledge between 1%-10% of your income for a fixed amount of time between 6 months to 10 years.
A 10% Pledge is a pledge to give 10% of your income until you retire.
Thereâs no progressive âtaxâ scheme for GWWCâs Pledges, unlike The Life You Can Save (TLYCS)âs recommendations. GWWC also has the option for people to pledge a percentage of wealth, and we encourage those with significant wealth to give a higher proportion of their assets.
We encourage people to âgive what they canâ and find a level of giving that best suits them. We find that people have very different expectations about how much they can or should give and think itâs for each person to decide what works for them. For example, some people on low incomes still take the 10% Pledge while others who earn significantly more might take a Trial Pledge for 1% or 5%.
If youâre new to giving, Iâd recommend taking a Trial Pledge for a percentage that feels comfortable to you, and plan on increasing it if you decide youâd like to give more.
Re: pre or post income tax, you can find the answer in this FAQ.
I donât know what country youâre in, but to calculate your annual pre-tax and post-tax income but if you google, thereâs usually calculators or tools that do this for your country!
Peter Singer has taken the 10% Pledge (although heâs mentioned he gives much more) but he is the founder of TLYCS. They are two different charities, which is why we have different pledges.
Giving What We Can offers a more active community around pledging, including a global slack community and dashboards to track your progress over timeâpromoting giving pledges is one of the main things we do and weâre planning on improving the experience for our pledgers over time! So Iâm biased in saying that taking a pledge with GWWC is a good idea, starting with a level of giving that youâre comfortable with.
If you have any further questions, you can reach out to us at community@givingwhatwecan.org
Currently at GWWC in our materials for EA Groups, we suggest that a Trial Pledge is a good starting point for people who are interested in effective giving, but are just learning about it.
My personal POV: I think itâs generally a good idea for people to try out giving 10% or take a Trial Pledge before committing to the 10% Pledge. I think itâs important that people feel comfortable with giving that amount and think seriously about what tradeoffs they might need to make if they take a 10% Pledge. But I think introducing people to the idea of the 10% Pledge at university is a good idea. We see people end up taking pledges even 10+ years after learning about it at university!
Thanks Davidâreally helpful to be able to read about this succinctly!
Thank you for this beautiful post, Julia. Your writing always really resonates with me.
Just echoing Lukeâs response here: When I moved from my corporate job to GWWC, I gave up ~30% of salary I would have had if I stayed. I still give at least 10% of my current salary.
I think I was lucky to be in a high paying role to begin with, and that I get paid a fair salary at GWWC but there definitely was a large financial cost to moving to a non-profit, especially on top of donating min. 10%.
Hi Simon,
Thanks for the question!
The EA Hub used to facilitate donation swapsâbut the project was retired so now thereâs no one owning this.
I think it can be hard to formally organise this, and have some reservations as to whether there could be legal implications for an organisation to run a project like this.
That being said, I know some people who are informally organising donation swaps at the moment.
It could be a good idea to gauge feasibility and interest in this across the EA community. I donât know if itâs something GWWC would want to own but I do think itâs worth someone exploring!
Another thing to mention is that in the absence of a donation swap, if you expect a non-tax-deductible donation opportunity to be âĽ2x times more impactful than one that you could claim a tax deduction on, you should probably choose the higher-impact option and forego the tax deduction. Hereâs a nice page to explain why: https://ââwww.givingwhatwecan.org/ââdonating-effectively-tax-deductibly
Thanks for your kind words about our work and team, too!!
Hi Vasco,
This isnât something that GWWC is currently planning to look into, but I think itâs a good question and Iâd like to see us develop our thinking about it further. Weâve made an internal note on this to discuss within the team!
We may also review this page mentioned next year to include sources.
Thanks as always for your feedback :)
Hi Vasco,
Thanks for your questionâI think itâs a good one!
I was going to write up a response but then I remembered we had this nice explanation on our research and approach page:
Some other organisations in the effective giving space advocate a particular âworldviewâ; for example, they might believe it is most impactful to focus on safeguarding the long-term future and as such, recommend giving to organisations working to reduce existential risk, rather than other high-impact causes like global health. Others may believe it is best to focus on non-human animal wellbeing, because the scale of the problem (if you value all sentient beings equally) is so enormous compared to human wellbeing and the solutions are much more tractable than attempting to safeguard the long-term future.
At Giving What We Can, we believe there are compelling arguments and reasons for focusing on any of the high-impact cause areas we recommend, and that no matter which one you choose, youâll have the capacity to help solve some of the worldâs most pressing problems and prevent the suffering of many. Weâve outlined why the cause areas we recommend are particularly impactful (and why we encourage supporting these over others) but we donât currently take a view on which of our high-impact cause areas we deem most impactful as we think this is quite value-specific. Instead, we wish to provide the public with a variety of highly effective giving options, and then empower them to determine which ones best align with their own worldviews/âvalues. Some of our donors feel strongly that theyâll have more impact by prioritising one of these cause areas; others prefer to diversify their giving portfolio across several cause areas.
So I think the TL;DR of this answer is that we provide recommendations across a number of worldviews but donât currently want to weigh in on what we think is the âcorrectâ worldview. This means that weâll be unlikely to create a ranked link of recommendations across our cause areas unless we change our view on how we think about worldview diversity.
Hi Vasco, I think youâre probably right in rational terms! For me personally, I find itâs actually helpful with donors sometimes to be able to talk about the different charities I donate to and meet them on their level. But Iâm also probably not as rational as I could be!
Thanks for writing this Lincoln! I see love as the foundation for all my interest in altruism, and have been thinking more about how to incorporate more of the messaging of love in my communications about effective altruism (as well as living up to my value of love as much as I can in other domains).
Iâve been really enjoying All About Love by bell hooksâwho talks similarly about love as the key for social progress. I hope to write more on my reflections about love and effective altruism soon.